Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
• Understanding the potential for, and the mechanisms by which personal tech-
nologies encourage students to reflect on their learning and learner experiences.
• Develop approaches to building academic literacies that access informal skills
developed through engaging with personal technologies.
• Investigate how personal technologies can be used to enhance and develop
communication, collaboration and interactions between students, students to
tutors, and tutors to students.
• Investigate how personal technologies can be integrated in learning activities to
maximise the impact of appropriate feedback on student progress.
2 Background
Fieldwork in Geography is seen as essential, providing engagement with the real
world through experiential and active learning (QAA 2007 ; Dummer et al. 2008 ;
Linsey et al. 2010b ). This is in contrast with some critiques of fieldwork where
''the dominant style of fieldwork which has developed is the excursion-type,
commonly called the ''Cook's Tour'' which is characterized by a didactic/
instructive teaching approach with passive student interaction'' (Hawley 1996 ).
To overcome this non-interactive approach to fieldwork we look to engage the
students by incorporating them in the process of building consensus and collab-
orating towards solving a task. In order to achieve this we draw inspiration from
mLearning initiatives (built on eLearning) which permit students to interact
remotely, enhancing interaction, collaboration and the development of ''commu-
nities of practice'' (Cobcroft et al. 2006 ).
Despite the acknowledged importance of fieldwork, eLearning & mLearning
approaches, the use of technology in the field has been absent (Fletcher et al.
2007 ). Teeuw et al. ( 2005 ) supported challenging existing fieldtrip practices and
the development of new approaches by incorporating new technologies. Techno-
logical developments (e.g. wireless technologies) and lower hardware and soft-
ware costs have also enhanced the potential for using sophisticated technologies in
the field with large cohorts (Field et al. 2005 ).
In order to integrate the mobile, dispersed collaboration and provide a spatial
reference we developed a geocollaborative framework. We explore the conceptual
elements of this framework below.
2.1 Geodeliberation
Much work has been done on testing and analysing approaches and processes
within consensus building efforts to solve geospatial problems as well as the
collaborative use of GIS. The idea of (geo)deliberation (Rinner et al. 2008 )
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